Alastair Turner explains how start-ups can make themselves heard in a crowded marketplace, the advantages they have over more established businesses and why creating a strong brand as soon as possible is the foundation for communications success

Having worked for huge corporations all my working life, I found myself in March taking the scary step of quitting my corporate middle-management job and, along with a substantial pay cut, becoming the fifth employee at a small start-up called Scratch.

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to using Twitter. On the one hand, privacy is far less complicated to manage on Twitter. You don’t have to worry about managing specific tweets to go out to specific people (yet). All you have to do is go to Twitter’s home page, click the icon of the head in the corner, and then click “Settings”.

Events attended by the country’s top employers, their own investment funds and a combined annual turnover of more than £1.8m: the UK’s student societies mean business. The RBS ESSA seeks to reward them, writes Gemma Howe

I’ve heard the saying that nothing worthwhile is easy but in graduating into an oversubscribed and shrinking profession in the middle of a global recession, I really had to push the boundaries of this theory.

“In 25 years, mobiles today will be the size of a red blood cell and one billion times more powerful. 3D printing will mean that consumers own the means of producing anything they want. Other technologies ranging from energy to clean water will mean affluence for everyone on the planet. Everyone will have a life envied by the richest monarch of the 19 century,” explains Russell Buckley, the founder and ex-MD of the now Google-owned AdMob.